Counter vs Simple Analytics
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
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The short answer
Both sides assessedCounter compared with Simple Analytics
Simple Analytics has a free forever plan with unlimited pageviews under fair use, five sites, events, an API, and a company behind it, which makes it strictly more capable than Counter at the same headline price of zero. The only reasons to prefer Counter are the smaller script and the preference for supporting an independent developer directly. For a business, Simple Analytics is the better free option.
Simple Analytics compared with Counter
Counter is a pay-what-you-want, AGPL, solo-developer project with a roughly one-kilobyte script and deliberately minimal features. It is cheaper than free-tier Simple Analytics in spirit but carries real continuity risk (its domain lapsed once) and no events, goals, or API to speak of. Use Counter on a personal site; use Simple Analytics anywhere a business decision depends on the numbers.
Choose Counter if
Personal sites, blogs, side projects, and open-source project pages where the only question is how many people visited and where they came from, and where the owner would rather support an independent developer than pay a subscription.
Choose Simple Analytics if
European site owners, bootstrapped SaaS companies, and privacy-conscious marketing teams who want a readable cookieless dashboard with no consent banner, plus GA4 users who want a parallel measurement layer that captures the visitors their banner and ad blockers are hiding.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Counter | Simple Analytics |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Analytics | Analytics |
| Starting price | $0 (pay what you want) | $0 (free forever), then €20 per month |
| Pricing model | Pay what you want: the service is free to use and asks for a voluntary, affordable service fee, with no tiers, feature gates, or trials; the AGPL source can also be self-hosted at your own infrastructure cost. | Freemium with a free forever plan, one self-serve paid plan priced in pageview bands via a slider, per-seat add-ons, and a quote-only Enterprise tier. |
| Free plan | The entire product is free to use with no feature gating; users are asked to contribute a voluntary service fee when they are able. | Free forever with unlimited pageviews under a fair-use policy, 5 websites, 1 user, and 30 days of data history. |
| Free trial | Not applicable; the service is free to use indefinitely | 14 days on the paid plan, no credit card required |
| Best for | Personal sites, blogs, side projects, and open-source project pages where the only question is how many people visited and where they came from, and where the owner would rather support an independent developer than pay a subscription. | European site owners, bootstrapped SaaS companies, and privacy-conscious marketing teams who want a readable cookieless dashboard with no consent banner, plus GA4 users who want a parallel measurement layer that captures the visitors their banner and ad blockers are hiding. |
| Setup time | Under five minutes. Create an account, paste a one-kilobyte script, and the numbers start appearing. There is nothing else to configure. | Under ten minutes: paste one script, install the WordPress plugin, or deploy through Google Tag Manager, and data appears immediately. Proxying through your own domain for blocker resilience takes an extra half hour of DNS and routing work. |
| Learning curve | None. The dashboard has four sections and no report builder, which is the entire design intent. | Effectively none for the dashboard, which is the entire design goal. Events, the export API, and the BI connectors are the only pieces that need documentation time. |
| Platforms | Web app (German-hosted), Self-hosted (Go binary plus Redis), JavaScript tracking script | Web app (EU-hosted cloud), WordPress plugin, Google Tag Manager, Looker Studio connector, Power BI connector |
| Compliance | GDPR, ePrivacy (no cookies, so no analytics consent required) | GDPR, ePrivacy Directive and PECR, CCPA, CNIL and DSGVO alignment, SOC 2 in progress |
| Founded | 2020 | 2018 |
| Headquarters | Berlin, Germany | Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Ownership | Independent single-developer project, funded by voluntary user payments | Bootstrapped; 100 percent owned by its founders with no outside investors |
Strengths and limitations
Counter
Strengths
- The most conservative privacy architecture in this category: no cookies, no fingerprinting, no persistent identifier in browser storage, and no IP processing in the application backend.
- A tracking script of roughly one kilobyte, which is among the smallest in existence and effectively free in page weight terms.
- No consent banner required, with less to explain to a data protection officer than any competitor because there is less data being handled.
- AGPL-licensed and self-hostable from a Go binary plus Redis, so the software survives whatever happens to the hosted service.
Limitations
- The hosted service is run by one developer with no SLA and no support commitment, and the domain has already lapsed once, in 2025, which is a real continuity risk.
- No events, goals, funnels, or conversion reporting at all, so it cannot answer whether a campaign produced signups.
- No meaningful API, warehouse export, or BI connectors, so the data cannot feed anything else you run.
- No teams, roles, white labelling, or client dashboards, which rules it out for agency use entirely.
Simple Analytics
Strengths
- A free forever plan with unlimited pageviews under fair use and five websites, which no other serious privacy-first tool matches on volume.
- Paid pricing starts at €20 a month for 100,000 pageviews and 10 websites, with no overage surprises inside a band.
- The strongest privacy architecture claims in the group: no cookies, no browser storage, no IP storage, no visitor IDs, EU hosting under a Dutch entity.
- The traffic recovery positioning is commercially honest, acknowledging that most businesses will keep GA4 and selling a complement rather than pretending a replacement is realistic.
Limitations
- Per-seat pricing at €20 per additional user is expensive relative to competitors that bundle three to ten team members into the base price.
- The free plan's 30-day history window means trend analysis and year-over-year comparison are impossible without paying, unlike free tiers that limit volume instead.
- SOC 2 is described as in progress rather than complete, which will stall some procurement reviews that a competitor with a finished report would pass.
- SSO, role-based access, and raw data access sit behind a demo-gated Enterprise tier, so the self-serve product has a hard ceiling for larger teams.
Pricing compared
Counter
Pay what you want: the service is free to use and asks for a voluntary, affordable service fee, with no tiers, feature gates, or trials; the AGPL source can also be self-hosted at your own infrastructure cost.
- Hosted (pay what you want)$0
- Self-hosted$0
At a price of zero with an honest request attached, the value question is not really about money, it is about risk and scope. What you get is a fast, tiny, genuinely private visitor counter that answers two questions well and asks nothing of you. What you do not get is events, goals, funnels, an API, teams, or any commitment that the service will exist next year. For a personal site that is an excellent trade and the right thing to do is pay something. For a business, the six to twenty dollars a month that Pirsch, Simple Analytics, Plausible, or Fathom charge buys continuity, support, and a feature set that grows with you, and that is money well spent rather than money saved.
Simple Analytics
Freemium with a free forever plan, one self-serve paid plan priced in pageview bands via a slider, per-seat add-ons, and a quote-only Enterprise tier.
- Free€0
- Simple€20
- EnterpriseCustom
The free plan is the most useful free offer in privacy-first analytics because it does not meter your traffic, and for a small site the 30-day history limit is genuinely liveable for months. The €20 paid plan (100,000 pageviews, 10 websites, 3 years of history) is priced close to Plausible and Fathom at the same volume. The value breaks down on teams: at €20 per extra seat, a marketing department of five costs €100 a month for a tool whose competitors bundle ten users, so this is best value as a one-person or two-person purchase and worst value as a departmental one.
Editorial verdict on each
Counter
Counter is the most likeable product in this category and the one you should be most careful about depending on. The privacy engineering is genuinely the strictest here, refusing even to process IP addresses in the backend, the script is a kilobyte, no consent banner is needed, and the whole thing is free with a polite request attached. For a personal blog, an open-source docs site, or a portfolio, it is the right tool and you should pay the developer something. For anything commercial, the absence of events, goals, an API, teams, and any service commitment is disqualifying, and the fact that the domain lapsed once in 2025 is not a detail to gloss over. If you like the philosophy but need reliability, Simple Analytics is free and more capable, Pirsch is six dollars and far deeper, and Umami is the open-source version to self-host instead.
Read the full Counter profileSimple Analytics
Simple Analytics is the most sensible starting point in privacy-first analytics for a one-person or two-person business, because the free plan gives you unlimited traffic on five sites and only asks for money when you want history back. The €20 paid plan buys three years of history on 10 websites, the AI assistant is a better interface than any report builder for non-analysts, and the Dutch EU-only architecture is the cleanest answer available to a European privacy review. Two things to check before buying: seats cost €20 each, which makes it a poor fit for a marketing department of five, and SOC 2 is still in progress. The traffic recovery pitch is the most honest thing any vendor in this category says out loud, which is that you are probably not deleting GA4, so buy the tool that gives you the numbers you can actually trust while Google keeps feeding your ads.
Read the full Simple Analytics profileCounter profile last reviewed 2026-09-27; Simple Analytics last reviewed 2026-09-27. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.
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Frequently asked questions
6 questionsWhat is the difference between Counter and Simple Analytics?
Simple Analytics has a free forever plan with unlimited pageviews under fair use, five sites, events, an API, and a company behind it, which makes it strictly more capable than Counter at the same headline price of zero. The only reasons to prefer Counter are the smaller script and the preference for supporting an independent developer directly. For a business, Simple Analytics is the better free option.
Is Counter or Simple Analytics cheaper?
Counter starts at $0 (pay what you want). Simple Analytics starts at $0 (free forever), then €20 per month. The billing models differ, so the entry price is rarely the whole cost. Counter pricing model: Pay what you want: the service is free to use and asks for a voluntary, affordable service fee, with no tiers, feature gates, or trials; the AGPL source can also be self-hosted at your own infrastructure cost. Simple Analytics pricing model: Freemium with a free forever plan, one self-serve paid plan priced in pageview bands via a slider, per-seat add-ons, and a quote-only Enterprise tier.
Does Counter or Simple Analytics have a free plan?
Counter has a free plan. The entire product is free to use with no feature gating; users are asked to contribute a voluntary service fee when they are able. Trial terms: Not applicable; the service is free to use indefinitely. Simple Analytics has a free plan. Free forever with unlimited pageviews under a fair-use policy, 5 websites, 1 user, and 30 days of data history. Trial terms: 14 days on the paid plan, no credit card required.
Who should choose Counter?
Personal sites, blogs, side projects, and open-source project pages where the only question is how many people visited and where they came from, and where the owner would rather support an independent developer than pay a subscription.
Who should choose Simple Analytics?
European site owners, bootstrapped SaaS companies, and privacy-conscious marketing teams who want a readable cookieless dashboard with no consent banner, plus GA4 users who want a parallel measurement layer that captures the visitors their banner and ad blockers are hiding.
What are the best alternatives to Counter and Simple Analytics?
SaaSTracker profiles 16 products in GTM Analytics. The Summer 2026 awards in the category went to Google Analytics 4 (Category Leader), Umami (Best Value), HockeyStack (Momentum). Every profile is compiled from primary sources, so a shortlist can be built from pricing, limitations, and fit rather than from star ratings.
